A Dataset of Ancient Chinese Math Word Problems and an Application for Research in Historic Mathematics

Florian Keßler


Abstract
Solving math word problems, i.e. mathemati-cal problems stated in natural language, has re-ceived much attention in the Artificial Intelli-gence (AI) community over the last years. Un-surprisingly, research has focused on problems stated in contemporary languages. In contrast to this, in this article, we introduce a dataset of math word problems that is extracted from an-cient Chinese mathematical texts. The dataset is made available.1 We report a baseline per-formance for GPT-4o solving the problems in the dataset using a Program-of-Thought paradigm that translates the mathematical pro-cedures in the original texts into Python code, giving acceptable performance but showing that the model often struggles with understand-ing the pre-modern language. Finally, we de-scribe how the generated code can be used for research into the history of mathematics, by of-fering a way to search the texts by abstract op-erations instead of specific lexemes.
Anthology ID:
2025.alp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing
Month:
May
Year:
2025
Address:
The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna
Editors:
Adam Anderson, Shai Gordin, Bin Li, Yudong Liu, Marco C. Passarotti, Rachele Sprugnoli
Venues:
ALP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
59–70
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.alp-1.8/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Florian Keßler. 2025. A Dataset of Ancient Chinese Math Word Problems and an Application for Research in Historic Mathematics. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing, pages 59–70, The Albuquerque Convention Center, Laguna. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Dataset of Ancient Chinese Math Word Problems and an Application for Research in Historic Mathematics (Keßler, ALP 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.alp-1.8.pdf